]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2016/07/lrmogrify-and-imagemagick-7/feed/0Enfuse For Real Estate Photographyhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2014/12/enfuse-for-real-estate-photography/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2014/12/enfuse-for-real-estate-photography/#commentsMon, 15 Dec 2014 07:52:43 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1759Continue reading →]]>Simon Maxwell has recently released an incredible 145 (!) book on using Enfuse, and in particular LR/Enfuse, for real estate photography. I highly recommend it to all users of this plugin, whether they user it for real estate photography or for other subjects. Areas covered include:

Chapter 1 The Problem: Limits Of A Single Exposure

Chapter 2 The Solution: What Enfusing Can Achieve

Chapter 3 Shooting Brackets

Chapter 4 Creating Enfused Images – With LR/Enfuse

Chapter 5 Batch Processing – With LR/Enfuse

Chapter 6 Advanced Methods

Chapter 7 Enfuse-Flash Hybrid

Chapter 8 An Enfuse Shoot From Start To Finish

Lightroom Presets

Happy reading!

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2014/12/enfuse-for-real-estate-photography/feed/0Arctic Whiteness release Final Cut Library Managerhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2014/03/arctic-whiteness-release-final-cut-library-manager/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2014/03/arctic-whiteness-release-final-cut-library-manager/#commentsTue, 04 Mar 2014 22:05:52 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1745Continue reading →]]>I’ve just released a new application (via Arctic Whiteness) that will appeal to those of you that also do video work using Final Cut Pro.

Final Cut Library Manager is a great utility for running housekeeping tasks on Final Cut Pro X libraries. It’ll immediately find all Spotlight-indexed libraries and display them in one window so that they can easily be sorted and searched. Libraries may be cleaned to recover gigabytes worth of space by quickly and safely removing render files, proxies and optimized media files (users can rest assured that we don’t remove the optimised media if we can’t find the corresponding original media files).

Another small but oh-so-very-useful feature is Open Alone which will open a library by itself in Final Cut Pro to avoid having to manually close all the other libraries first. Finally!

To celebrate the release of this product we’re offering the full version for a promotional price of just €4.99 (just under $6.00 for those outside of the Europe)!

Fear not, I’ve been working like a madman to find a solution. The latest version of LR/GMail now uses an entirely new way of connecting to the server that should solve these issues, and a number of other ones too.

Now, you may be wondering why people would use a plugin to send emails rather than using the built-in support that’s been available since Lightroom 4. Well, LR/GMail provides a number of niceties you don’t otherwise get:

The plugin also accesses your contact list to provide auto-completion of your contacts as you add them to the To, Cc and Bcc fields.

The plugin stores information on which images have been sent via LR/GMail (so that you can filter them).

The plugin stores a list of recipients to whom each photos has been sent (accesssed from Lightroom’s metadata panel). This gives you tracabilty for future reference.

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2013/07/lrgmail-1-40-released/feed/0Photographer’s Toolbox is now under the “Arctic Whiteness” umbrellahttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2013/07/photographers-toolbox-is-now-under-the-arctic-whiteness-umbrella/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2013/07/photographers-toolbox-is-now-under-the-arctic-whiteness-umbrella/#commentsTue, 23 Jul 2013 13:54:28 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1730Continue reading →]]>Following a slight reorganisation the Photographer’s Toolbox is now officially part of my software development company Arctic Whiteness.

This change will have no affect on existing or new users other than the fact that payments are now invoiced in Euros rather than UK Pounds, and you’ll be send to Arctic Whiteness’s PayPal page for payment processing.

Some of you may have noticed that it’s been rather hard to get my attention for the last 4 months. I’m sorry about that. Here’s the reason:

The Touch is a new way for Mac users to work with Lightroom using either a trackpad or an iPad. At the heart of The Touch is its ability to allow you to develop your images without having look away from your work. A set of simple and intuitive gestures allow you to instantly grab the correct slider or puck and move it with precision without having to spend you time finding these elements on the user interface. Even if the slider in question isn’t visible on the interface The Touch will scroll straight to it.

It really is a totally different experience to be able to develop your images while never taking your eyes off your work – I urge you to give it a go!

Additionally, The Touch also provides support for a whole host of other functions for navigation control, rating and flagging images, switching quickly from the Library to the Develop module, seeing your images in full screen, etc. It’s quite possible to return from a shoot and do an initial edit using just The Touch.

Never before have I worked so hard on a new project. I’ve quite literally been working from 9am to 2am most days since the end of November! I’m personally a little bit tired now, but I hope you enjoy the result!

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2013/03/the-touch-a-new-way-of-controlling-lightroom/feed/0Happy New Year (and an announcement)http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2013/01/happy-new-year-and-an-announcement/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2013/01/happy-new-year-and-an-announcement/#commentsTue, 01 Jan 2013 17:40:54 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1721Continue reading →]]>Happy New Year to all! We hope that 2013 brings you all much photographic satisfaction….

We have some great news to start the new year off: Sean McCormack is now distributing his popular Lightroom galleries via the Photographer’s Toolbox. Welcome aboard Sean!

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2013/01/happy-new-year-and-an-announcement/feed/0Faster, more reliable downloads…http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2012/11/faster-more-reliable-downloads/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2012/11/faster-more-reliable-downloads/#commentsTue, 06 Nov 2012 13:09:17 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1703Continue reading →]]>We sometimes have comments from users who are unable to download the latest version of their plugins from within Lightroom. Often the download is very slow, other times it fails half way through. The problem principally affects users who are located out of Europe (where our server is located).

This distance-related problem also manifests itself when asking the Enfuse plugin to download our copy of the Enfuse binary application.

To solve these problems we’ve now experimenting with an infrastructure change that should provide you all with more reliable plugin updates. As we move forwards plugins will be stored on a global “Content Delivery Network” hosted by Amazon, which is a fancy way of saying that the files in question will be stored much closer to your physical location, and should thus be much quicker – and more reliable – to download.

Since this represents a major change for us we’ll be rolling out the changes slowly. We’re going to start with LR/Enfuse to ensure that all’s well, and new versions of our other plugins will be updated over time.

We’d love to hear from users of LR/Enfuse who had experienced these problems before to know if this solves the issue for them….

I’ve just released ListView 1.60 with a series of significant changes and improvements:

Easier to change data displayed

Click the triangle in the column header

A new dialog box replaces the previous long drop down lists

Display and output Develop fields

Slows down performance (there’s no batch access)

Freely mix Develop data with

Sort by Develop data

Save sorted items to a collection (the sort is in the “user order”)

Display and output various other fields

Video

Folder paths

Pick flags

Edit count and time

Completely new floating “File Info” panel (shown right)

Only available in Lightroom 4

Displays info about same 10 fields as List View

Floats, so you can move from file to file in grid view or the filmstrip

Display more EXIF info while you’re working in Develop

Put it on a second monitor

Two additional panels for Metadata

A File Info panel including folders, file size

One bringing together copyright and other minimal data entry

Save export data to location other than the desktop

It’s a preference in Plug-In Manager

A lot more logging

So much more that it really slows things down

Switch it on when (if) you need it

]]>

http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2012/06/list-view-1-60/feed/0Keyboard Tamer – a GREAT tool for Mac Usershttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2012/04/keyboard-tamer-a-great-tool-for-mac-users/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2012/04/keyboard-tamer-a-great-tool-for-mac-users/#commentsThu, 26 Apr 2012 12:04:12 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1685Continue reading →]]>Hot on the heals of version 2.00 of Keyboard Tamer I’ve just released version 2.11 which adds support for adjusting the development sliders for images under Process Version 2012.

I have to thank Peter Karlsson from Svarteld for driving the recent updates to Keyboard Tamer, and this screenshot is a reminder as to why this is such a useful plugin, not only for users of non-US keyboards, but also for all Mac users, as we’ll see below….

Lightroom doesn’t provide any keyboard shortcuts for the development sliders, and so Keyboard Tamer does something slightly tricky to solve this issue. By creating menu items to adjust the various development sliders Mac users can use the System Preferences to assign keyboard shortcuts!

However, that’s not the best of it. The really great thing is that these shortcuts work everywhere – from every module. No more switching to the Develop module to make a quick change to an image!

Thanks for that inspiring screenshot Peter!

I’ve also improved things for Windows users. By default those menu items will no longer be visible in the menu, so you won’t have to be bothered be something that serves you much less purpose that it would to a Mac user…

I’ve just released an update to address LR 4 compatibility. Notice that you’ll now either be asked for your admin password (on Mac) or else be asked to run as an administrator (on Windows). There’s no need to panic, it’s just that Keyboard Tamer works by making changes to some of Lightroom’s own files (after backing up the originals), and under Lightroom 4 access to these files is now protected by default.

All of our plugins should continue to work perfectly under LR4. If you discover any issues that we missed then please let us know and we’ll address them as quickly as possible.

Happy snapping!

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2012/03/lightroom-4-and-our-plugins/feed/17Web galleries, Lightroom 4 & a bit of publicity…http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2012/02/web-galleries-lightroom-4-a-bit-of-publicity/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2012/02/web-galleries-lightroom-4-a-bit-of-publicity/#commentsMon, 20 Feb 2012 15:26:47 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1671Continue reading →]]>Many of you have noticed that some of my web galleries have stopped working properly under Lightroom 4. In particular, the WSPP galleries had a number of problems when being viewed in the web module.

Of course, there was no chance that I was ever going to leave you in the lurch before the final release of LR4! Today I’ve posted updates for the following galleries:

Impact

Impact WSPP

Filmstrip WSPP

Jigasawrus

Elegance

Note that along with adding LR4 support the update to Elegance also fixes a compatibility issue with Internet Explorer 9.

Now, I know you’re all just dying to know why it’s taken a few weeks to deliver updates following the release of the LR4 beta. The reasons is that I’ve been working non-stop on a beautiful new iPhone/iPad app and I wanted to get that released so that I could then focus clearly on plugin updates.

And to that end I’d urge to to take a look at this gorgeous app:

http://www.artogramapp.com/

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2012/02/web-galleries-lightroom-4-a-bit-of-publicity/feed/0Search and Replace 1.35http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2012/01/search-and-replace-1-35/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2012/01/search-and-replace-1-35/#commentsTue, 31 Jan 2012 15:19:57 +0000John Beardsworthhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1663Continue reading →]]>Search and Replace 1.35 has just gone live with quite a few small improvements as well as some bug fixes. The main changes are:

If only one item selected, you are now prompted to add all other visible items

New commands to copy the filename to the title – with and without file extensions

Parse and Audit now adds columns in the Library filter panel listing all the values in the “copy from” and “copy to” fields – handy when you’re checking what’s in those fields

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/11/a-beautiful-website-created-with-impact-wspp/feed/2TPG Elemental adds Photoshop Elements 10 support and morehttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/10/tpg-elemental-supports-pse-10/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/10/tpg-elemental-supports-pse-10/#commentsSat, 15 Oct 2011 10:27:33 +0000Matt Dawsonhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1656Continue reading →]]>There is something to benefit existing and potential users alike with the latest update to the TPG Elemental plugin. New users will find support for the recently released Photoshop Elements 10, and tailored help and recommendations for resolving potential compatiblity issues between Lightroom and Photoshop Elements. Existing users will notice the ability to control the bit depth used when opening images, more consistent application of Lightroom’s develop settings in Photoshop Elements, and users lucky enough to be running Lightroom 3 no longer need to manually save images before using Elemental!

The upgrade is free to registered users, and we’ve reworked the web site (and Lightroom’s Help menu) to explain all of the new features. Enjoy!

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/10/tpg-elemental-supports-pse-10/feed/0José Fernandez does Star Trails toohttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/10/jose-fernandez-does-star-trails-too/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/10/jose-fernandez-does-star-trails-too/#commentsWed, 12 Oct 2011 11:58:43 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1646We recently posted some of José Fernandez’s beautiful landscape images that were created using LR/Enfuse. Now José’s sent us a couple of stunning Enfused star trails too.

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/10/jose-fernandez-does-star-trails-too/feed/0Need to time your shoot? Perfect Timers could be the solutionhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/10/need-to-time-your-shoot-perfect-timers-could-be-the-solution/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/10/need-to-time-your-shoot-perfect-timers-could-be-the-solution/#commentsWed, 12 Oct 2011 11:27:24 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1640Continue reading →]]>
Ever needed to time a shoot? If you’ve got your iPad at hand then Perfect Timers could be the ideal solution.

Okay, I’ll admit that the link to photographic tools may be tenuous, but Perfect Timers is my first iOS application and I need some coverage!

Besides, it really is nice app….

I was frustrated when looking for a good timer app for his iPad – the applications Ifound were either lacking in the functionality I needed (multiple timers, overrun timing and the ability to easily add minutes to a running count down) or else unbearably ugly. Eventually I took it upon myself to help all those timer-less iPad-owning aesthetically-demanding souls out there, and thus Perfect Timers was born!

LR/Blog now lets you upload to, and create blog posts on your TypePad account. With this addition LR/Blog now officially supports:

TypePad

Blogger

WordPress

The NextGEN gallery for WordPress

and many other MetaWebLog compatible blogs too.

The upgrade is free to registered users, and I’ve also completely reworked the web site documentation to make things a little clearer, so get blogging!

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/10/want-to-upload-to-your-typepad-account-weve-got-you-covered/feed/1Need an invoice?http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/10/need-an-invoice/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/10/need-an-invoice/#commentsTue, 04 Oct 2011 09:58:16 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1630Continue reading →]]>We occasionally get requests for invoices for the plugins that you buy (or donate towards). Last week silently introduced the ability to get your invoice delivered to you automatically.

Fortunately we hadn’t made a big song and dance about this, because unfortunately we had an error in the generator that meant that the invoices had the wrong invoice number.

If you had downloaded an invoice before today then please download it again. We’re really sorry about this inconvenience.

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/10/need-an-invoice/feed/0LR/Blog – Now you can post directly to your NextGEN galleryhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/09/lrblog-now-you-can-post-directly-to-your-nextgen-gallery/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/09/lrblog-now-you-can-post-directly-to-your-nextgen-gallery/#commentsMon, 26 Sep 2011 10:36:38 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1624Continue reading →]]>Many of you use LR/Blog to post your images directly to your WordPress blog and today I’m excited to announce that I’ve taken the plugin even further by adding support the excellent NextGEN Gallery for WordPress.

NextGEN Gallery gives WordPress users much greater flexibility when presenting images on a blog. Thanks to the new integration with LR/Blog you can now upload your images directly to a new or existing gallery, and then create a post that will directly insert the images into the post.

I’d love to hear your feedback on this new feature and also any other requests you have for LR/Blog.

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/09/lrblog-now-you-can-post-directly-to-your-nextgen-gallery/feed/1LR/Enfuse for landscapeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/09/lrenfuse-for-landscapes/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/09/lrenfuse-for-landscapes/#commentsMon, 19 Sep 2011 09:13:29 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1601Continue reading →]]>Photographer José Fernández recently contacted the Toolbox to show us the results of his work using LR/Enfuse to blend multiple exposures.

These landscape images are spectacular and we’re only too happy to share them with you. Click the images to see them bigger.

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/09/lrenfuse-for-landscapes/feed/1Impact gets Captionshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/09/impact-gets-captions/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/09/impact-gets-captions/#commentsThu, 15 Sep 2011 10:33:49 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1597Continue reading →]]>With Impact WSPP you’ve been able to add captions to your web site for a while now, and I promised that this feature would be added to the standard version of Impact too.

I’ve finally had a change to make good on that promise; version 1.70 of Impact offers the same annotation feature as Impact WSPP.

Have fun with it!

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/09/impact-gets-captions/feed/4List View plug-inhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/06/list-view-plug-in/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/06/list-view-plug-in/#commentsTue, 28 Jun 2011 12:04:07 +0000John Beardsworthhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1592Continue reading →]]>ListView is a plug-in for Lightroom 3 that displays images in a list style just like in most other DAM (digital asset management) programs. Sometimes it’s a lot easier to review your metadata entry in a list than by scanning through a grid of thumbnails.

Other things you can do with List View:

Change the information in any column

Save columns as presets

Sort by any column

Export metadata to a browser

Export metadata directly to Excel

Edit metadata in a File Info panel

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/06/list-view-plug-in/feed/0LR Backuphttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/05/lr-backup/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/05/lr-backup/#commentsSun, 01 May 2011 05:44:00 +0000Matt Dawsonhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1583Continue reading →]]>You’ve invested a lot of time perfecting your photos and setting up Lightroom to suit the way you work. What would you do if you woke up tomorrow to discover your hard drive had crashed and you had lost all of that work?

Hopefully you will never have to find out, but just in case Matt Dawson has released the TPG LR Backup plugin to simplify backing up your Lightroom environment. It does this by adding the ability to backup Lightroom’s configuration files, and compress Lightroom’s catalog backups, from within Lightroom itself. These tasks can occur automatically as the program starts or manually as required. Setup the automated backups to save onto a second disk and that hard drive crash would be much less painful to recover from than it could otherwise have been.

Jean Claude Vallot has created a series of video tutorials, in French, on the use of our WSPP plugins (such as Impact and Filmstrip). It’s an impressive amount of work that’ll be very useful to French speakers.

Perhaps the most important plugin that I offer to professional photographers who license their images is PLUS for Lightroom.

PLUS refers to both an XMP-based metadata standard for embedding licensing information directly into images, and to the large international consortium of companies that form the standard’s governing body.

The PLUS standard is very well designed, being both flexible enough to meet virtually any licensing requirements, and concise enough to be clear and unambiguous in its use.Metadata embedded into images can be read by a variety of tools; for example there are now PLUS panels built into directly into CS5.

Lightroom 3 now includes built-in support for a small but useful number of PLUS fields, such as model release identifiers, licensor information, etc. The fields that are available are those that also happen to be part of the IPTC Extension schema (the two standards bodies work together to avoid creating duplicate metadata fields where their needs overlap).

The PLUS for Lightroom plugin provides photographers with access to all the PLUS fields, and until now it has ignored the presence of the built-in ones, continuing to offer its own variants that were in place since its release (well before Lightroom 3 came to market). This has meant that for Lightroom 3 users there have been two distinct and unconnected fields into which the user could enter the same PLUS image licensing information. With the new release of PLUS for Lightroom I now offer full integration with the fields that are now provided natively by Lightroom 3. Any PLUS metadata that you had previously entered into the fields provided by the plugin itself can be migrated automatically to Lightroom’s built-in ones, resulting in a much more integrated experience1.

This improved integration aside, the plugin continues to offer its impressive feature set – access to the full range of PLUS fields and the ability to easily define licensing requirements and to embed these into your images during export.

If you’re licensing images as a commercial, editorial or stock photographer and you’re not yet up to speed with PLUS then we’d recommend that you take a look at what it can offer you, and then take a look at the plugin – we believe that PLUS for Lightroom offers the best PLUS license creation experience found on any asset management tool.

Note that the new version will continue to work under Lightroom 2, and that the plugin’s own versions of these fields will continue to be available to Lightroom 2 users.

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/03/plus-for-lightroom-updated/feed/0Snitch Sync – Improving your ShutterSnitch to Lightroom workflowhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/03/snitch-sync-improving-your-shuttersnitch-to-lightroom-workflow/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/03/snitch-sync-improving-your-shuttersnitch-to-lightroom-workflow/#commentsFri, 11 Mar 2011 18:18:38 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1559Continue reading →]]>We’ve just released a handy plugin for those of you that use ShutterSnitch to wireless send images to your iPad.

ShutterSnitch allows users to rate their images on the iPad, and our Snitch Sync plug-in will allow you to synchronise this information with your RAW images in Lightroom.

The workflow is as follows:

In the field, you shoot RAW images to your card and send small JPEGs wirelessly to the iPad (using ShutterSnitch) for quick review. Only small JPEGs are sent to reduce the transmission time.

After the shoot you can rate your images on the iPad using ShutterSnitch.

Back at the studio you import your RAW images into Lightroom.

From ShutterSnitch you send yourself your Selection List by email.

Using SnitchSync you copy and paste the contents of your email into the field provided. The plugin will read the data, match the JPEG filenames with the RAW images, then update the ratings.

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/03/snitch-sync-improving-your-shuttersnitch-to-lightroom-workflow/feed/0Metadata Panelshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/02/metadata-panels/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/02/metadata-panels/#commentsWed, 23 Feb 2011 14:27:46 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1551Continue reading →]]>Matt Dawson has releases a new plugin that extends the Metadata section within Lightroom’s Library module. It adds a number of pre-defined metadata layouts (tagsets) that configure how much of an image or video’s metadata is visible at a time. These new layouts have been designed to help focus on the important metadata when photographers are performing key tasks such as managing copyright and model releases for their digital assets.

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/02/metadata-panels/feed/0Search and Replace v1.28 releasedhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/02/search-and-replace-v1-28-released/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2011/02/search-and-replace-v1-28-released/#commentsThu, 03 Feb 2011 13:43:17 +0000John Beardsworthhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1543Continue reading →]]>I have just released a significant upgrade to Search Replace Transfer which has an extra tab “Location to Keywords / IPTC Extension”. This has two main purposes:

To copy IPTC location fields to the corrsponding IPTC-Extension’s fields

To integrate the IPTC location fields with keywords

Copy from IPTC fields to the keywords

Copy from keywords to the IPTC fields – which means you can apply locations by dragging and dropping just like in iView or Expression Media

Update the Date Time Original EXIF field of scanned images. Lightroom’s filter panel and smart collections can then find the images by searching for when the pictures were originally taken rather than when they were digitised.

The Good News: The price is only going up by £5 to £25, so the WSPP plugins still represent exceptional value for money compared to the nearest equivalent1 (although really, there is no true equivalent to WSPP’s unique approache to web site creation).

The Fabulous News: You now get a contact sheet view too….

The Contact Sheet view

The new contact sheet view

Until now the WSPP series has been fine tuned to display your portfolio images in their best light thanks to a beautiful presentation.

With the latest release we starting to address the needs of your clients. The new contact sheet view can be applied on a per gallery basis, and is designed to be used on the galleries in your client area. The images are displayed in a very nice grid view, and there are options to allow the user to download images and to display geographical information via Google Maps.

By default the shape of the grid changes dynamically to fit the window size whilst still remaining centered for the best aesthetics – this was technically very challenging and to the best of our knowledge this is the first time this has been achieved successfully across different browsers.

We’re starting the new year with some small but nice updates to our WSPP plugins:

You can now choose to use the main gallery index page as the starting page for your site.

There are now various options for positionning the thumbnails on the gallery index pages.

Adding a border around the gallery index boxes when they are touching now looks correct (no more doubled up borders). Lots of you have been asking for this.

The number of options displayed in one go when designing your page has been significantly reduced. Instead, options for many pages types (gallery index, contact page, gallery…) are only displayed when viewing the page in question. This makes it a lot easier find the option your looking for, and paves the way for upcoming features that would have otherwise overwhelmed the panal rail.

Menu options can now have separators between them when the menu is horizontal.

All the tick boxes for adding outlines to various elements have been removed – instead you should now set the border width to zero. You may need to update your user templates to removed unexpected borders – sorry about that.

With Impact WSPP 1.20 you can now overlay captions onto your images. You can also specify a fixed size “matting” to go around the image. If you wish you can use this area to hold the navigation bar, the descriptions and the position dots so that they don’t overlap your images.

Once these features have settled in and we’ve had your feedback we’ll be porting them over to the standard version of Impact too.

There are other changes too, such as a back button to take you to the parent level, and the ability to put links into your gallery descriptions.

One noteworthy change – the text size of the descriptions on the gallery index pages is now fixed in pixels rather than points. This will give better consistency across browsers, but you’ll need to tweak the size of your text in any existing templates you’ve made.

Passwords can be added to either individual galleries or to entire sets. Multiple username-password combinations are supported, so you can manage access to galleries with a lot of finesse.

Both galleries and sets can now be hidden from the main gallery index too. Used in combination with the password control, this can be used to provide you with a private client area.

The system is very flexible and can be moulded to meet just about any need. Here’s an example that may be suitable for a wedding photographer, and here’s another that’s more suited to a commercial photographer.

Your web host needs to offer PHP support for the password protection to work. As you would expect the plugin handles everything for you, there’s no need to modify any files by hand or otherwise get your hands dirty

You’ll notice that there’s now an extra tick box next to the list of options for selecting the image from a gallery to use on the index page.

This box tells the plugin not to use the image in the gallery itself – but to use it only for the index page. This is great if you wish to create a cropped virtual copy of an image to use on the index but to then show the entire image in the gallery.

Of particular interest to us was the large number of people requesting a WSPP plugin based on a horizontal scrolling gallery. Not wishing to disappoint, we temporarily put aside the development of the galleries that we were working on and starting working on a solution.

The result is Filmstrip WSPP. We’ve really taken into account your requests and comments, and we’re exceptionally happy with the result. We’ve worked hard to try to produce something unique, and we’ve created a feature set is way beyond a typical gallery of this type. Here are the highlights:

Multiple image resolutions are exported and the most appropriate resolution is used when displaying the images. This ensures fast loading on mobile devices without penalising the image quality on desktop machines.

Very configurable interface. The “filmstrip” can be displayed in many ways thanks to the ability to add spacing and borders.

Optional fixed size header and footer areas give you space to put menus and controls that won’t interfere with the images.

Individual annotations can be displayed on the images. Annotations can include image metadata and may be formatted with Markdown.

The display of annotations can be turned on and off by the viewer.

Custom pinch gestures for iOS devices such as the iPhone and iPad allow visitor to change the height of the strip.

Our Web Site Publisher Pro plugins are very different from traditional Lightroom Web Engines. Rather than creating a single gallery in the web module you instead design the look and feel of your entire site from there, and then create a Publish Service in the library module with which to upload your site. By adding collections and collection sets to the publish service you can create a complete web presence that includes a structured hierarchy of galleries along with other pages such as the home page, a contact page, a links pages, etc.

As usual there are plenty of options for laying out your site, changing the colour scheme, and so forth. Here’s an example:

It’s really never been so easy to create a web site from within Lightroom, it’s never before been possible to create a gallery hierarchy using collections and sets, and no other web engines allow you to incrementally upload just your changes to the site.

To really demonstrate just how flexible the layout options are we asked photographer Peter Karlsson at Svarteld if he would create a site to show off the plugin. We’re not sure what’s impressed us most, the fact that Peter willingly put aside his day to come up with something great, or the fact that the plugin was powerful enough to allow Peter to come up with something this great in just one day!

The Elemental plugin integrates Photoshop Elements (PSE) with Lightroom, enabling external editing of images using a workflow similar to Lightroom’s native integration with Photoshop. It allows images to be PhotoMerged, Opened as Layers or Smart Objects, and more in the Photoshop Elements Editor directly from Lightroom.

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/11/tpg-elemental/feed/0Storyboarder v1.10 – produce Storyboards with exact width or height you requirehttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/10/storyboarder-v1-10-produce-storyboards-with-exact-width-or-height-you-require/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/10/storyboarder-v1-10-produce-storyboards-with-exact-width-or-height-you-require/#commentsThu, 28 Oct 2010 11:34:16 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1452Continue reading →]]>Storyboarder is proving to be a popular plugin and we’ve had a number of requests from users who wish to create storyboards with either a fixed height or a fixed width.

Well, we’ve listened, and version 1.10 now adds these layout options. Compared the the existing options which try to optimize the layout of the images to make best use of the space available, the new layout options have will maintain the order of the images (either from left to right for a fixed width storybaoard, or from top to bottom when the height is fixed).

We’d love to show some of your storyboards on this blog – let us know if you have any that you’d like to share.

Update: Version 1.10 has just been released, and offers the option of uploading the Zip archive to an FTP server.

This plugin allows you to create a Zip archive of images and videos using Lightroom’s export feature. You may encrypt the archive using a password for extra security.

The plugin is released as donationware.

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/10/a-handy-new-plugin-zip-exporter/feed/3Impact 1.60 – yes, can you finally have a transparent menu barhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/10/impact-1-60-yes-can-you-finally-have-a-transparent-menu-bar/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/10/impact-1-60-yes-can-you-finally-have-a-transparent-menu-bar/#commentsWed, 20 Oct 2010 15:01:20 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1430Continue reading →]]>Lots of users have asked for an update to Impact that allows them to have a transparent menu bar, but with the menu items themselves visible.

Version 1.60 addresses this request, and it’s probably most useful when the items are stacked vertically which causes the bar to be very tall.

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/10/impact-1-60-yes-can-you-finally-have-a-transparent-menu-bar/feed/0Storyboarder – a new Lightroom pluginhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/10/storyboarder/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/10/storyboarder/#commentsThu, 07 Oct 2010 14:38:47 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1418Continue reading →]]>We’ve just released Storyboarder, a fun new plugin for creating a “storyboard” of images. This could be great for photographers who have a sequence of images that should be displayed together. Here’s an example:

There are loads of options for controlling the layout and colours – there are more examples in the quick guide.

Give it a go, and if you create any great storyboards then let us know so that we can post them here!

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/10/storyboarder/feed/2Syncomatic 1.23http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/10/syncomatic-1-23/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/10/syncomatic-1-23/#commentsWed, 06 Oct 2010 14:04:10 +0000John Beardsworthhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1413Continue reading →]]>Version 1.23 of Syncomatic has just been released and now, as well as handling files with matching names, it can synchronise metadata and adjustments within stacks

When you add metadata like the title or keywords to a stack, Lightroom only updates the picture on the top of the stack – items lower down the stack are not updated. So if you do want all members of the stack to share similar metadata, you first have to expand the stack and select all the items. Then after adding the metadata, you would collapse the stack again. For some users, that is OK because they will only keep the best image and don’t want to annotate the rejects. But for others it’s pretty inefficient, for instance stock photographers or those who use stacks to gather frames intended for panorama stitching. For them the stacks-metadata problem is often a reason for not using the stacking feature.

Sync Stacks is intended to overcome that problem. It adds a menu command and:

Loops through the selected pictures

Finds images that are at the top of their stacks

Copies their metadata to the rest of the stack

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/10/syncomatic-1-23/feed/0Use your iPhone or iPad as an extra keyboard to control the Lightroom development sliderhttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/09/use-your-iphone-or-ipad-as-an-extra-keyboard-to-control-the-lightroom-development-slider/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/09/use-your-iphone-or-ipad-as-an-extra-keyboard-to-control-the-lightroom-development-slider/#commentsThu, 30 Sep 2010 11:54:34 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1390Continue reading →]]>Photographer Tom Landskron had recently contacted us with a great tip for using our Keyboard Tamer plugin along with an iPhone to give an extra “keyboard” with access to the develop sliders. Here are the gritty details:

PhotoDeck is a fanstastic image hosting service that allows independent photographers to create a full e-commerce platform. In contrast to stock agencies and portals that sell contributed images for a hefty commission, PhotoDeck empowers a photographer to create his or her own online store to sell his work directly to photobuyers, keeping the relationship with the client. PhotoDeck takes no commission on sales that originate from the website.

With LR/PhotoDeck you can now upload directly to collections and galleries on your PhotoDeck account. The plugin even keeps track of which images have already been uploaded so that you don’t inadvertently end up with multiple versions of an image on the server.

Syncomatic’s original purpose was to tidy up metadata when you are faced with sets of pictures whose names match but whose metadata is out of sync. For instance you may have lots of TIFs or JPEGs which have been output from your raw files, but you then added keywords to the raw files. How do you then make 1234-edit.tif have the same keywords and other metadata as the original 1234.nef, make 1235-edit.tif the same as 1235.nef and so on? Syncomatic does that job.

It now does the same with adjustments.

Why would one want to do that? Well, for example, I was contacted by someone who had taken 15,000 pictures in a very short period, and sheer pressure of work had led him to switch his camera to Raw+JPEG and import only the JPEGs. He’d then added ratings, captioned and keyworded the JPEGs, done some quick adjustments, and submitted modified JPEGs to his clients. Now he was home and wanted to import his raw files and prepare stock and portfolio quality images from them. That was where he hit a wall. He could restore the raw files into the same folder as the JPEGs, and then synchronise the Lightroom folder – but Lightroom hides the JPEG and brings in the raw files without any IPTC metadata or adjustments. Even if one had saved the metadata back to the JPEGs, it wouldn’t really treat them like sidecars. The other approach for RAW+JPEG is to change the catalogue option so it imports separate files, but then there was the problem of copying the metadata and adjustments from each JPEG to its corresponding raw file. That’s why I updated Syncomatic.

Another possible application is when you have a new camera which has a raw file type which Lightroom doesn’t yet support. What you might do – after filing a complaint with the camera maker and demanding they offer a DNG option – is shoot Raw+JPEG, import the JPEG files, and add your metadata and adjustments. When Lightroom is updated, you can import the raw files and use Syncomatic to update them. I’m not sure if that will work in practice, but I suspect so.

Now, there are some limitations – but not many. Essentially I’m using the develop preset mechanism, so Syncomatic can only apply adjustments that you can save in a preset. Above all, that means cropping can’t be synchronised. But it does pretty well everything else, which isn’t too shabby.

]]>http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/09/syncomatic-1-22-released/feed/0Welcome aboard Matt Dawson! TPG Snapshotter now on Photographer’s Toolbox…http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/09/welcome-aboard-matt-dawson-tpg-snapshotter-now-on-photographers-toolbox/
http://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/2010/09/welcome-aboard-matt-dawson-tpg-snapshotter-now-on-photographers-toolbox/#commentsTue, 07 Sep 2010 21:43:26 +0000Timothy Armeshttp://photographers-toolbox.com/blog/?p=1377Continue reading →]]>Matt Dawson, a.k.a. The Photo Geek, has joined the team at the Photographer’s Toolbox. His TPG Snapshotter plugin is now available from the site, and he’ll put putting on his other plugins as time allows.